There was an excellent example of CRM building up to the release of Alice in Chains’ new album Black Gives Way to Blue. Here’s what they did:

1. Introduced some teaser videos onto the internet for the their new track thus creating buzz
2. Several days later they made the full video available
   At roughly the same time they made the track available free online for fans once they submitted their email address
3. Several weeks later these fans were sent correspondence regarding the release date of their new album, plus info about merch available
4. Soon after they advertised that the album would by available for pre-sales, and that anyone who purchased the album on pre-sale would receive another track off of the album immediately for free
5. When the album was release they sent more email with details of where to get the album and more merchandising links

The buzz around Black Gives Way to Blue was immense. Before the album was released they had sold a bunch of albums and load of merch, and fans suspicious of a band returning without their revered frontman are now singing along with the new singer and material at gigs.

Make no mistake, this is exemplary music marketing – marketing of ANY kind. AIC had a hard job ahead of them, after being away for over a decade, to convince a bunch of fans already suspicious of the whole venture that they were still relevant. Well they certainly took the risk out of the situation!

This approach was clearly tailored for the needs of a massive band, but the same principles apply to any band. The 3 basic steps are:

1. Announce your presence
2. Locate your fans
3. Talk to them

Step 1 and 3 I’ll cover off in a later article. Here I’ll concentrate on step 2 as you need to give it a little forethought before you plough into this endeavour.

So when people turn up at your gig, or website or Myspace, you need to be ready to try and grab some information about them.

Now, I’m going to talk explicitly about email in this article. In theory, any detail you can get about your fans is useful (for example Twitter/Facebook/Myspace account, address, phone number, favourite bands, shoe size, propensity to put out) but email is still the most versatile, powerful and easy to exploit, plus pretty much everyone has an email address.

Ideally you want email address and name (first, and preferably full), but just email address is fine. There are various ways to grab this info.

• At gigs. Put a sheet of paper on the merch counter to get folks to sign up for your mailing list. Consider offering an incentive for this, perhaps a free button badge, or a discount voucher for the next gig.
• Folks you run into. You’re always banging on about your band to whoever will listen, at parties and stuff, right? Folks sound interested? GET THEIR EMAIL! Wake up next to that random chick who’s wearing nothing but your AC/DC socks? Decided you never want to see her again? I don’t care, GET HER EMAIL!
• Collect it online. I saw a particularly good example of an unsigned band doing this recently. The most excellent prog-metalers Stone Circle announced via Twitter that they are giving away a free MP3 from their current EP, and more free stuff to come, to anyone who will sign up to their mailing list using a service called FanBridge. This site exists for the explicit purpose of collecting an managing email lists for bands. They offer a bunch of tool to manage your email campaigns and I’ll be referencing them a LOT in upcoming articles. Do go and sign-up to Stone Circle’s FanBridge list by the way – they will get signed soon and will probably stop giving away their excellent music.

So you’ve got a bunch of email addresses, what do you do with them? This I will cover in more detail in later articles, but for the moment, you need to store them somewhere. The first thing to do is transfer details collected in the real world to you computer, preferably into MS Excel (if you or your folks don’t have a copy, try Google Docs which has a free online spreadsheet) and save somewhere safe. FanBridge will let you upload lists of fan detail from Excel, so if you have an account this is a good idea.

For details collected at gigs, note the town that the gig was in as part of the details you collect. Later, when you’re telling folks about your tour, you won’t need to spam people in Brighton about your gig in Glasgow; you can create a separate email for each town or area.

Now, before you get too excited and start spamming your list with random photos of the band getting drunk, beware the evils of excessive email. If people don’t like what you send them, they’ll simply mark your email address as spam, and all further mails from your email address will be relegated to the junk mail folder. Before you send out any email at all, you need to plan your email campaign based on what you need to get out of it. This we will discuss in the next article. In the meantime, get collecting kiddies!

CRM for Bands – Turning fans into Fanatics

Tags: Alice in Chains, CRM, FanBridge

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 1:22 pm and is filed under CRM, Resources for Bands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.